Google Analytics Acquisition Channels

If you open Acquisition Overview in Google Analytics you can see 4 main channels for traffic sources:

Direct

Social

Organic Search

Referral

But, what does this mean for your business? Let’s explore them one by one. We will start with the first one – Direct Traffic.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is the traffic from your Offline Marketing efforts. For example, everyone that will read your website url from your Business Card or some other marketing material like brochure, and type it directly into the browser is contributing to your direct traffic.

Make sure to exclude your personal traffic with some plug-in like: “Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on (by Google)” -> search extension in Google Chrome, so that it is not measured in Google Analytics.

So, you must not forget to include your Website Url in every marketing material that you make for Offline Promotions.

Social Media Channels

It’s quite intuitive. If you click on Social link, you can see all Social Networks traffic, like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. The more social you are, the more people will get to know your business. Be active on social media and you will gain more followers and customers.

Organic Search

This is your Google reward for creating good content. The best thing is that it is Free. But, you can’t control it. You just have to write about everything valuable that you work on, on daily basis. What you have learned, your ideas, your thoughts. If, that inserts value to your audience, then you will have many shares, likes, comments, and that is what Google wants and rewards.

Referrals

Do you have Partners? This is traffic from your Partners. Online Partners.

If you don’t have, you need to think of how to make them. They will link your Website from their websites and their visitors will click on your links. So, you will see this kind of traffic as a Referral traffic.